The Informers: Hannah Arendt's Appraisal of Whittaker Chambers
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This article was downloaded by: [Peter Baehr] On: 03 June 2014, At: 17:13 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/recp20 The informers: Hannah Arendt's appraisal of Whittaker Chambers and the ex-Communists Peter Baehra a Department of Sociology and Social Policy, Lingnan University, Hong Kong Published online: 30 May 2014. To cite this article: Peter Baehr (2014) The informers: Hannah Arendt's appraisal of Whittaker Chambers and the ex-Communists, European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 1:1, 35-66, DOI: 10.1080/23254823.2014.909734 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23254823.2014.909734 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. 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Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http:// www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions Downloaded by [Peter Baehr] at 17:13 03 June 2014 European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 2014 Vol. 1, No. 1, 35–66, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23254823.2014.909734 The informers: Hannah Arendt’s appraisal of Whittaker Chambers and the ex-Communists Peter Baehr* Department of Sociology and Social Policy, Lingnan University, Hong Kong (Received 8 November 2013; accepted 26 March 2014) By the time that Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism was published in 1951, one totalitarian regime lay in ruins while another – Soviet Communism – stood newly reenergized. Stalin’s prestige, burnished by victory, had never been greater. The cold war was re-dividing the world. And, in the United States, the fear of Communism was a pervasive feature of the political landscape. The revelation that the State Department and other government ministries, in the 1930s and beyond, had been penetrated by American Communists, prompted public outrage against the miscreants. It aroused corresponding curiosity about those who had once embraced the Marxist creed but who now publicly renounced it. One such person was Whittaker Chambers (1901–1961) – Communist spy, Communist defector, and key witness in the perjury trial of Alger Hiss. Into this imbroglio stepped Hannah Arendt. She was by turns suspicious and dismissive. Who were the ex-Communists? Why had they broken with Communism? How thorough or deep-rooted was their abrogation? On her account, Chambers and others like him had no understanding of democratic politics and of what it means to be a quotidian political actor. She also denounced ‘ex-Communist’ informing as analogous to the exposure practices of totalitarian regimes. This article evaluates the cogency of her analysis. It devotes particular attention to a problematic distinction Arendt draws between ‘ex-Communists’ and ‘former’ Communists. And it seeks to answer a question that Arendt left opaque: when, if ever, is informing Downloaded by [Peter Baehr] at 17:13 03 June 2014 against fellow citizens justified in a constitutional republic? Keywords: Hannah Arendt; Whittaker Chambers; Communism; informing; Arthur Koestler Introduction While Hannah Arendt was visiting Munich in June 1952, a package arrived for her back home in New York containing a book that would soon become a literary cause célèbre. Written by the errant Communist Whittaker Chambers, it bore a *Email: [email protected] © 2014 European Sociological Association 36 P. Baehr title – Witness – as linguistically economical as it proved to be provocatively rich (Chambers, 2002/1952). In Arendt’s absence, her husband Heinrich Blücher read it first. He was discomfited: There’s no doubt, really, that his allegations are correct. And unfortunately: this man couldn’t act any differently. He had to become an ‘informer.’ He made his decision during the Hitler-Stalin pact, and they [sic] were necessary decisions. From my standpoint that doesn’t make the book any less horrible and, politically speaking, quite damaging – but that, not out of ill will but out of ignorance.1 Arendt’s immediate response is unknown. On political matters, she and Blücher were typically in accord. But her view of Whittaker Chambers (1901–1961) was, or came to be, very different from that expressed in her husband’s letter. Chambers’ decision to inform on past friends and colleagues was not ‘necessary,’ Arendt affirmed. It was transparently wrong because it recapitulated, in the fight against Communism, a Communist method. More generally, Arendt voiced the strongest reservations towards that group of people who had once embraced Communism wholeheartedly but who were now publicly renouncing it. In a famous slap down, her friend Mary McCarthy urged Arendt to dispatch Chambers without compunction. Witness did not deserve to be treated, and hence reviewed, as a proper book; it was something else: part of the attempt by ‘this new Right … to get itself accepted as normal.’2 Tony Judt (2008/1997, p. 307) commends Arendt for ignoring such coarse advice but he underestimates the degree to which she followed it. Two essays are particularly relevant for our purposes: the first, a piece for the liberal Catholic journal The Commonweal called ‘The Ex-Communists’ (Arendt, 1994/1953),3 and a slightly earlier, unpublished, paper entitled ‘The Eggs Speak Up’ (Arendt, 1994/1951/2). While noting some of their peculiarities of style and emphasis, I treat both essays as threads of a single argument. My argument is that Arendt’s appraisal of Chambers suffers from a kind of conceptual suffocation: a blanketing of Chambers’ particular history, and the com- plexities it raises, by her desire to make a bigger point through a distinction Downloaded by [Peter Baehr] at 17:13 03 June 2014 between ‘former’ and ‘ex’-Communists. That distinction, I will show, is theoreti- cally flawed because it is insufficiently flexible; it is unable to handle the most vital post-Communist biographies. It subordinates a character to a typology. A salient issue that Arendt raises in her discussion – the danger of political informing in a constitutional republic – is an important one and the inquisitional context in which she made it during the early cold war lends it credibility.4 But Chambers was not the best vehicle for Arendt’s rebuke of political informing because he was in no wise a typical informer. By failing to consider the peculiarities of his case, Arendt simplifies rather than clarifies the political stakes involved. She tends to elide the act of informing with totalitarian means or methods as such, thereby leaving no conceptual room to think about it as a legitimate if exceptional practice within a constitutional republic. Informing is something characteristic of European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology 37 the police, she insists, never of the duties owed by citizens to each other and to the state that houses their relationships. That assertion flatly evades, or at least is unable to ask, the hardest question of our discussion: might political informing ever be justified and, if so, under what conditions? Witness Arendt’s article on ‘The Ex-Communists’ says little about Whittaker Chambers and nothing at all about the Hiss case, except by implication. Her contemporaries, close to the sensational events, needed no introduction or reminders. Some 65 years later, we do. Published in 1952, Whittaker Chambers’ Witness narrates an epic chronicle of disgrace, drama, and redemption. A Long Island childhood, mired in humiliations petty and brutal, is recorded in agonizing detail. So too is the story of Chambers’ dysfunctional family, a morass of estrangement and mental illness that culminates in the suicide of a beloved brother. But the core of Witness turns not on the hero’s youth but on a quite different passage; it tells how Chambers was first attracted to Communism, then, in phases, repulsed by it. A student at Columbia University, Chambers adopted the Bolshevik credo in 1925. Lenin’s essays electrified him. Their unsparing diagnosis of bourgeois society, and the world it created, paralleled Chambers’ own sense of impotence. Equally compelling was the Leninist notion that revolution, eventuating in social justice on earth, was mandated by the dialec- tics of history. As the United States lurched further into economic depression, and as the western powers feebly stood by as fascism grew ever stronger in Europe, Chambers became in quick succession a Party member, a writer for its organ, The New Masses, and then an agent of the Communist underground – a courier of US government secrets furnished by Communist insiders – before eventually breaking with the Party at the time of Moscow purge trials of 1936 and 1937. Once his defection was complete, in April 1938, Chambers and his wife believed sensibly they were in mortal danger of assassination by the GPU.